The Confidence Man, or, Get me outa here, my dear man!

But throughout every story told in "Lo and Behold!," in and out of every verse, there is really only one voice, and that voice is the mask itself: "a portable heirloom," Constance Rourke wrote in 1931 in American Humor: A Study of the National Character, "handed down by the pioneer." A hundred years after Tocqueville's arrival in the new United States, Rourke was looking into the face of the Yankee pedlar, the original traveling salesman, the confidence man, though the words that replaced this appellation, "con man," also took away its meaning: what the confidence man sells, proffering his calico and patent medicine, his aluminum siding and asbestos insulation, his Amway dealerships and breast implants, is confidence. He looks you right in the face; his betrays no doubt, no greed, no fear, shame least of all.

I was reading that passage the other day, from Greil Marcus' astounding riff on The Basement Tapes, and it seemed so apt these days, with so many trying -- too often successfully -- to put the con back in conservative. Via the Poor Man, Oliver Willis writes,

Look. While Domenech’s violations were blatant, it is status quo for the conservative movement. Quite frankly, intellectual dishonesty is what these people do for a living (there are entire organizations dedicated to documenting and rebutting their ooze). Whether it’s cooking the books on environmental data, changing their stories to suit a new set of facts, or just straight up and up lying, cheating, and stealing, the conservative cause is simply a fraud.

They’ve put a lot of money into dressing up their fraud, from a bunch of well-staffed think tanks outputting shoddy research under the guise of science, to media outlets presenting propaganda as news, to activists who don’t think twice of appealing to the worst sort of bigotry in exchange for an electoral percentage or two, the conservative cause is composed of thousands of Ben Domenechs.

His only crime to them was that he got caught. Don’t believe them for a moment that they see a downside to what he did. Their only misgiving is that he didn’t do a good enough job covering his ass. Had Domenech’s work not been so simple to uncover (someone please give the Washington Post staff Google for Dummies), they would be expressing the same sentiment they had when his blog was launched. Their RedState blogger had landed at the Washington Post, and he would be able to inject even more of the fraudulent thinking that makes up conservatism into the mainstream.

But what Domenech, and many others like him, gave the Right through his phony statistics and plagiarized passages was a level of confidence that their "ideas" were backed up by "intellectual rigor."

Funny thing is, as the gentle tug of this thread unravels yet another invisible garment, even conservatives understand that young Ben's flaws were anything but -- they're part of the program. And some even resent it, even as they're a part of this shadow play.

And it goes well beyond a hack like Domenech, Crowley, and hackiest of all hacks, Corsi; it's the spirit of our times. When, as noted before, people who know less than spit are making policy in the Republican think tank now known as the Government of the United States it becomes readily apparent they've got quite a con in play.

And looking mighty confident in pulling it off.

The memo indicates the two leaders envisioned a quick victory and a transition to a new Iraqi government that would be complicated, but manageable. Mr. Bush predicted that it was "unlikely there would be internecine warfare between the different religious and ethnic groups." Mr. Blair agreed with that assessment.

The memo also shows that the president and the prime minister acknowledged that no unconventional weapons had been found inside Iraq. Faced with the possibility of not finding any before the planned invasion, Mr. Bush talked about several ways to provoke a confrontation, including a proposal to paint a United States surveillance plane in the colors of the United Nations in hopes of drawing fire, or assassinating Mr. Hussein.

Shit.

I pulled out for San Anton',
I never felt so good.
My woman said she'd meet me there
And of course, I knew she would.
The coachman, he hit me for my hook
And he asked me my name.
I give it to him right away,
Then I hung my head in shame.
Lo and behold! Lo and behold!
Lookin' for my lo and behold,
Get me outa here, my dear man!

Ben Domenech boarded his train to fame when he was, I dunno know, 15, and had his ticket punched at each new stop. Last week he got asked his name and the confidence was swept away when he had no good answer ("Nobody," Marcus might have answered for him).

If you look around, he's not alone on the Right in appearing to lose some of that confident swagger these days. After five-plus years of calling "bullshit" on these people, it's starting to stick. Maybe even at the washingtonpost dot con.